The Habit of Art: In the Beginning Was the Word

The mainstream stage in England is dominated by implicit aesthetic expectations of a national drama. These expectations, formulated around the perceived revolution in drama that took place in the 1950s, inscribe a fundamentally literary aesthetic that is most apparent in plays that invoke musical effect and allusion only to qualify its dramatic worth. Plays such as Tony Harrison’s The Prince’s Play, Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, Tom Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll, and Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art reveal a simultaneous wistfulness for and suspicion of music as an inherently foreign mode of dramatic expression. These entrenched suspicions are similarly evident in many mainstream critical appraisals.